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Saskia Hin

People’s life courses are shaped by the complex interactions of contextual factors, of individual behavior, and of opportunities and constraints operating at the macro level. Demography ...
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People’s life courses are shaped by the complex interactions of contextual factors, of individual behavior, and of opportunities and constraints operating at the macro level. Demography studies these processes with a focus on particular transitions in the life course: birth, leaving home, marriage, and other transitions in civil status (divorce, remarriage, and transitions into widowhood), the birth and survival of offspring, migration, and finally the end of the life cycle—death.

Initial work on the ancient world focussed primarily on macro-level data, trying to establish overall trends in population development on the basis of census figures and other population estimates. This approach has received further impetus with the advent of survey demography (see Population Trends). More recently, attention has turned to single events in the life course. Core demographic studies have attempted to establish patterns and rates of marriage, fertility, migration, and mortality. Others have taken a complementary approach with a stronger focus on qualitative data. These support investigation of sociological, cultural, and economic aspects of demographic phenomena. The remainder of this article focusses on a concise evaluation of current understanding of marriage, fertility, migration, mortality, and population trends in the ancient Greco-Roman world.

Antony Spawforth

Neologism of French scholarship (évergétisme, from εὐεργέτης, ‘benefactor’) to describe the socio-political phenomenon of voluntary gift-giving to the ancient community. Embracing the beneficence of ...
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Neologism of French scholarship (évergétisme, from εὐεργέτης, ‘benefactor’) to describe the socio-political phenomenon of voluntary gift-giving to the ancient community. Embracing the beneficence of Hellenistic kings and Roman emperors, whose subjects saw such philanthropy as a cardinal virtue of rulers (see kingship), it has been studied in recent years above all in relation to the *polis, of which benefaction by wealthy citizens and citizenesses becomes a defining characteristic from the 3rd cent. bce until late antiquity, as is attested by thousands of honorific inscriptions memorializing donors; it is also a feature of republican Rome, where the liberalities of senators in kind at least (public building, spectacle) resemble that of their humbler Greek contemporaries, and of the (Mediterranean) Roman city in general. In Greece the origins of euergetism go back to the aristocratic ideal of liberality found in Homer and echoed by Aristotle, who included acts of ‘magnificence’ (megaloprepeia) such as feasting the city among the virtues of the well-born man (Eth.Less

Vladimir F. Stolba

Panskoye I is one of the most prominent and best-studied settlements in the rural territory of Chersonesus on the Tarkhankut Peninsula (north-western Crimea). Founded in the late 5th ...
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Panskoye I is one of the most prominent and best-studied settlements in the rural territory of Chersonesus on the Tarkhankut Peninsula (north-western Crimea). Founded in the late 5th century bce as a fortified outpost (tetrapyrgia) protecting the south-eastern frontiers of Olbian territory, around 360 bce it was subjugated to Tauric Chersonesus, a close relationship which it maintained until the settlement’s catastrophic destruction around 270 bce. In 1969–1994, a significant part of the settlement and associated necropolis were investigated by the Tarkhankut Archaeological Expedition of the Leningrad Institute of Archaeology, Academy of Sciences of the USSR (since 1991, Institute for the History of Material Culture, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg). The settlement’s stratigraphy and size, as well as its unique structure and layout, representing an agglomeration of compactly placed free-standing farmsteads, adjoining house blocks, and monumental buildings accommodating more than one household, distinguish it from other rural settlements in the area. Its rich and original material culture shows a remarkable intermingling of various cultural components, both Greek and non-Greek.

Malcolm F. McGregor and P. J. Rhodes

Tribute lists (Athenian), records of the aparchai (first-fruits; pl. of *aparchē) of one-sixtieth given as an offering to *Athena from the tribute paid by the members of the *Delian League after the ...
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Tribute lists (Athenian), records of the aparchai (first-fruits; pl. of *aparchē) of one-sixtieth given as an offering to *Athena from the tribute paid by the members of the *Delian League after the treasury was moved from *Delos to Athens, very probably in 454/3 bce. (It is likely that previously an offering had been given to Delian *Apollo.) From 453 the offerings were calculated not simply on the total but separately on each member's tribute, and numbered lists of these offerings were inscribed in Athens: for the first fifteen years (453–439) on a single large block of marble, for the next eight (438–431) on another large block, and thereafter on a separate stele for each year. It is possible that no tribute was collected in 448, when war against Persia had come to an end and the future of the League was uncertain (whether one year is unrepresented in the sequence on the first block continues to be disputed); in 413 a 5% duty on all goods transported by sea was substituted for the tribute (Thuc.Less